The Poetry of Mental Unhealth: Philip Larkin

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To my knowledge, the last poet to have made the bestseller list — in England, anyway — is Philip Larkin, whose Collected Poems spent several months in 1988 battling it out with Robert Ludlum’sThe Icarus Agenda. That’s a remarkable achievement for a poet whose constitutional cheerlessness would not seem designed for popular success, but maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. British readers in 1988 apparently found in Larkin what most readers would delight to find anywhere: a compulsively readable meditation on the common life rendered in language formally rigorous yet wholly accessible. Larkin’s poetry, wrote Clive James in As of This Writing, “gets to everyone capable of being got to.” In composing superb lyrics for ordinary readers, Larkin in some ways faced a more daunting challenge than some of his modernist forbears, who, writing for a coterie, could occasionally allow the large or small passage of complete gibberish to pass through the net. After three slender volumes of mature verse, Larkin essentially gave up the job forever in his middle 50s. Unlike more typically gargantuan Collecteds, his is an inviting and readerly 200 pages.

Or was. The newly issued Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), edited by Archie Burnett, weighs in at 729 pages. Is Larkin well served by exhaustive annotations and the preservation of every scrap of juvenilia and disjecta? Such is the unhappy fate of a major writer, even one as scrupulously self-editing as Larkin. Must we now read every word, the obligation that, according to T. S. Eliot, is the debt owed to every major writer? I like to think Eliot was just kidding; I haven’t read the collected works of anyone. The nearest I’ve come is Larkin, whose Collected Poems (the nice friendly early one, not the big daunting new one), two fine early novels (Jill and A Girl in Winter), one collection of critical essays (Required Writing), one collection of music criticism (All What Jazz), and the posthumous Selected Letters can be got through in a couple of months. Brevity — some might say parsimony — not only shaped his career; it inhered in his poetry. Aside from a few narratives and quasi-narratives, all of his poems are lyrics, most fitting comfortably on one page and some a mere quatrain or two of tetrameter or less. Brevity, however, is not the same as reticence. For all his Englishness, Larkin was, superficially at least, as “confessional” as any of his American contemporaries, though what he had to confess was rarely so lofty as the rarefied anguish of Lowell or Plath or Sexton. In “If, My Darling” he inventoried the contents of his mind, there to find:

[a] creep of varying light,
Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles
Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate;

Delusions that shrink to the size of a woman’s glove,
Then sicken inclusively outwards.

Although the Larkin persona obviously resembled the man himself, he unashamedly distilled his worst qualities for literary effect. Neither “If, My Darling” nor any other poem tells you that Larkin ran a major research library at the University of Hull with uncommon perspicacity and professionalism for 30 years. Narrow, small-minded, and willful as his letters sometimes show him to be, Philip Larkin was hardly the monstrous collection of resentments and fears and lusts that the poem describes; or if he was, we all are, for the contrast “If, My Darling” makes between inner and outer, appearance and reality extends well beyond the individual case. It sickens inclusively outwards to us.

During the 1990s a great storm arose over the seamier revelations of Andrew Motion’sPhilip Larkin: A Writer’s Life and the even seamier revelations of Anthony Thwaite’s edition of Selected Letters.I found all that censoriousness much too pleased with itself. Larkin hoarded like the miser he was, collected mild bondage magazines, and occasionally used the “n” word — hardly laudable traits, but not exactly war crimes either. Persona or no persona, didn’t he make it clear in “If, My Darling” that he was no model of mental health? The argument seemed to be that if someone used the word “nigger” in his correspondence (which he did — half mocking his own bigotry, but only half), the poetry he wrote must reflect the same racist, rancid prejudices. But it doesn’t. Larkin, who was very far from confusing art with life, knew that his prejudices and pettinesses were inassimilable to his poetry. “Wogs,” “niggers,” and “bitches” belong to the lexicon of his prose, not to his verse, which does indeed sometimes express conservative social and political views. Yes, I too wish he had been a liberal, but I fail to be horrified by the nostalgia for duty (“Next year we are to bring the soldiers home / For lack of money”) expressed in “Homage to a Government,” which happens to be quite a good poem.

Readers have a perfect right to regard Philip Larkin, as I do not, as a complete shit. But if they consider his personal failings indistinguishable from his poetry, I think the loss is theirs. Did the celebrated author and distinguished university librarian really believe that “Books are a load of crap,” as the last line of “A Study of Reading Habits” has it? Unlikely, even if the Larkin-like speaker of that poem gives vent to feelings of bibliographic disillusion and disgust that even the most enraptured bibliophile will secretly have experienced. As it happens, the sorts of books the poem describes (“the dude / Who lets the girl down before / The hero arrives, the chap / Who’s yellow and keeps the store”) are a load of crap; they certainly have damaged the speaker, who, unlike the poet, made the fatal mistake of confusing art with life. Any poet/librarian can gush about the wonder of reading; it takes a special kind to deplore it.

Philip Larkin is so hated in some quarters that it may be necessary to point out that the pulp fiction fantasies of “A Study of Reading Habits” (“Me and my cloak and fangs / Had ripping times in the dark. / The women I clubbed with sex! / I broke them up like meringues”) are not intended as models of social interaction. Larkin neither broke up women like meringues nor recommended doing so. Nevertheless, it would be hard to mistake the bitter irony of the title. This study of a severely damaged psyche does not hide its meanings in layers of symbol and allusion. None of Larkin’s poems do. Rather shockingly, they mean pretty much what they say. “There’s not much to say about my work,” he told the Paris Review. “When you’ve read a poem, that’s it, it all quite clear what it means.” I’ve read many fine essays about him but no book-length critical study. What would be the point? An ordinary reader with a modicum of experience in poetry and its forms is as likely to appreciate Larkin as any scholar or poet. Aside from the rare hermetic specimen like “Dry-Point” or “Myxomatosis,” every Larkin poem is eminently paraphrasable. This one is about the tedium of working for a living, that one is about visiting provincial churches, another one is about listening to jazz, and they are all, to invoke the similarly tarnished Matthew Arnold, a criticism of life. How is it that verse that can be reduced to paraphrase and that offers restricted scope for interpretation can be so affecting? Maybe it’s because the poems still allow for mystery, uncertainty, doubt. In “Days” Larkin asked the unrhetorical questions “What are days for?” and “Where can we live but days?” and proposed an unrhetorical answer:

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Larkin’s poetry may be unfashionably paraphrasable, but it rarely takes positions or declines into the merely personal; that’s what his letters were for. (“The Slade [art school] is a cunty place, full of 17-year-old cunts,” for example, or, thrillingly, this bit of railway intrigue: “I had a hellish journey back, on a filthy train, next to a young couple with a slobbering chocolatey baby — apart from a few splashes of milk, nothing happened to me, but the strain of feeling it might was a great one.”) How a dour, penny-pinching, provincial fussbudget created poetry of such delicacy and grace might in the end have something to do with the person in the persona. Could it be that Philip Larkin wasn’t such a horror after all? I leave that question unanswered. However, the sympathy he extended to ordinary suffering mortals is no less characteristic of his work than the mordant wit and atrocious honesty for which it is equally reputed.

The temptation with any Larkin poem is simply to quote it. What can be said about the overwhelming pathos of “Deceptions,” a depiction of the rape and abandonment of an impoverished girl in Victorian England, that isn’t already in the poem? Oh, I’ll think of something. In fact, I will stoutly rise to Larkin’s defense, because the tact with which he treats the subject has sometimes been mistaken for callousness. It’s true that “Deceptions” lacks all declamation or handwringing; therefore Larkin must be on the side of the rapist, mustn’t he? But after all, Larkin is merely writing about rape and abandonment. Unlike the girl whose testimony serves as the poem’s epigraph (“I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt”), he’s not actually suffering these things. These are rather different orders of experience, as he acknowledges in the lines, “I would not dare / Console you if I could.” He had the luxury to reflect in rhymed pentameter on the girl’s violation. She didn’t:

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun’s occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

And if she was, as the second stanza maintains, “the less deceived,” this hardly excuses her persecutor. The victimizer was more deceived than the victimized because, being male, older, and of a higher social standing, he could afford to be. The poor start out undeceived, and stay that way. Unless you think that the act of writing enacts the crime symbolically, the cruelty and coldness here belong to the rapist, not to the poet. Put it another way: If you read this heartbreaking, miraculous poem — a Dickens novel in 17 lines– and find in it nothing but confirmation of Larkin’s bad faith and misogyny, maybe the problem is you.

Paraphrasable but irreducible, Larkin’s work remains poetry, not argument. What possible ideology can be inferred from “Water” other than a nostalgia for transcendence? Typically for Larkin, such transcendence as can be imagined is to be found not in some exotic tarn or “crouched in the fo’c’scle” of a freighter rounding the Horn but in a glass of water:

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

As often as not in Larkin, such moments of nearly visionary consciousness are as likely to be negative as positive, but his work is in fact full of intensely lyrical apprehensions that belie his reputation as a crusty conservative with no patience for the inexplicable or the numinous. The man who revered Margaret Thatcher, wrote weekly letters to his nagging mother, and vacationed in provincial British resorts like Sark, Malvern, and Chichester, had more poetry in his soul — perhaps that was his problem — than he knew what to do with.

To return to the question of how Larkin’s poetry can be so affecting, I repeat that I have no clear answer except to say that his remarkable technique clearly has something to do with it. Like Thomas Hardy (his principal influence) or, for that matter, Shakespeare, he uses established poetic conventions as beautiful in themselves and as the most efficient means of carrying content. I like a little showing off, but Larkin’s most brilliant effects are deployed so subtly as to be undetected until the third or fourth or 20th reading. The concealed intricacy of his rhyme schemes and enjambments allows for a seemingly straightforward, conversational style; it sounds as if a man of unusual fluency is simply talking to you. For instance, the three stanzas of “Faith Healing” (“Slowly the women file to where he stands / Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair”) rhyme ABCABDABCD — often enough, that is, to knit the poem together, but at such spatial and temporal distance as to avoid any sing-song predictability and to afford pleasures both conscious (if you notice the pattern) and subliminal (if you don’t). And that’s an easy one. Sometimes the rhymes are consonantal (park/work, noises/nurses in “Toads Revisited”), sometimes they’re whole words (home/home, country/country, money/money in “Homage to a Government”), and sometimes I know they’re there but I can’t quite determine where (passim). Nor is this to speak of the variety of stanzaic and metrical variation, the enjambments, the half lines, and the metaphors so powerful that they lodged even within a mind so unpoetic as Margaret Thatcher’s. (When they met in 1980 the Iron Lady favored him with a misquotation of the lines, “All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives” from “Deceptions.” “I . . . thought she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines, not that I don’t kiss the ground she treads,” he noted to a correspondent.)

Even readers hostile to Larkin will generally acknowledge his extraordinary craftsmanship. What ultimately matters, of course, is not this or that bit of adroit versification but the intellectual and emotive truth of his work. Even here, alas, we’re not quite in the clear, because Larkin’s pessimism is sometimes hard to distinguish from morbidity. I believe that his work is fundamentally humanistic and humane, but a poet capable of lines like “Life is first boredom, then fear” (“Dockery and Son”) and “Man hands on misery to man” (“This Be the Verse”) was not out to provide easy consolations.

No work of Larkin’s is more “challenging” — that is, more apparently inhumane — than “Aubade,” a sort of “Anti-Intimations Ode” and certainly his last great poem. Its theme, to put it more bluntly than the poem does, is that the horror of death renders life meaningless. (In a nice bit of Larkinesque irony, “Aubade” appeared in The Times Literary Supplement two days before Christmas in 1977.) It would be difficult to overstate the bleakness of this poem, starting with its savagely ironic title. The poem is, literally, an aubade — a song of dawn — but whereas most aubades herald the coming of light and life, Larkin’s proclaims the immanence of “Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, / Making all thought impossible but how / And where and when I shall myself die.” The speaker — oh, what the hell, let’s just call him Larkin — has awoken at 4 a.m. and waits out the dawn in existential terror. Till then the darkness will serve quite nicely as a metaphor for “the total emptiness forever, / The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.”

Well, Larkin certainly had the courage of his convictions. No stoicism or detachment softens the harshness of “Aubade.” The subject announced in the first stanza — “the dread / Of dying, and being dead” — is carried with remorseless consistency to its remorseless conclusion four long stanzas later. I might as well admit that I’m determined to find whatever shred of humanism I can in this pitiless poem, but others have given it up as a bad job. No less an authority than Czeslaw Milosz called it “a desperate poem about the lack of any reason — about the complete absurdity of human life — and of our moving, all of us, toward an absurd acceptance of death” (Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi, 2006). It’s not that Milosz objected to Larkin’s thematics, and he greatly admired his “wonderful craftsman[ship].” What he found “hateful” about “Aubade” was its passivity, its “attitude of complete submission to the absurdity of human existence.” With this attitude, he went on to say, “Poetry cannot agree…Poetry is directed against that.”

The first and perhaps feeblest answer to Milosz’s objections is to point to the sheer beauty of the poem, its equipoise and fluency. Any formal structure won out of the materials of horror and death represents some affirmation of the will, does it not? Larkin might simply have got “half-drunk,” lost the battle to insomnia, and succumbed to despair, as he no doubt did on many a night and as a few million people are probably doing at this very moment. But he also ordered his thoughts about that experience, conjoining the intimate and the cosmic in five 10-line stanzas rhymed ABABCCDEED, with a penultimate half line setting off the devastating apercus of the concluding pentameter line. And he makes it look easy. Seamus Heaney, who shared some of Milosz’s doubts about the ultimate value of “Aubade,” nonetheless found a moral significance in its artistry. “When a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life” he wrote in Finders Keepers. “When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity…In this fundamentally artistic way, then, ‘Aubade’ does not go over to the side of the adversary.”

Nevertheless, Heaney believed that in every other way “Aubade” does go over to the side of the adversary. I maintain, on the contrary, that this doom-ridden dirge is on our side. You may disagree, and if you do, you should never read “Aubade” again. A book or a poem may chasten or challenge or disturb or disillusion, but if it just makes you feel lousy, you are well advised to toss it out the window. In the end, “Aubade” doesn’t make me feel lousy, though God knows it’s not a poem I can read casually or without a certain tautening of the nerves. In the first place, why would Larkin, who repeatedly and strenuously objected to what he considered the inhuman alienations of modernist art, inflict punishment on his readers? This was a man who adored Beatrix Potter’s fables for children and believed, as he wrote in “The Mower,” “We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.” Still, the gentle, nostalgic Philip was quite at home with the scabrous, vindictive one, and there’s no reason that the latter couldn’t have written “Aubade,” as the less forgiving, bitterer man wrote “The Old Fools,” “The Card Players,” and some other characteristically intransigent pieces. “Aubade” is a long way from Beatrix Potter, but its ferocity is conditioned by an almost shocking — in the context — mildness of tone. The poem is not fundamentally about “remorse — / The good not done, the love not given,” but it includes those things, and if despair is inherently solipsistic, that too is conditioned by a recognition of a very special horror: at death there is “Nothing to love or link with.” It’s in the final stanza, however, that Larkin opposed, albeit gingerly, a rather surprising counterforce — life:

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Life, be not proud. It and we are going to lose this battle — forever — but on the way to defeat, people love and link, work gets done, responsibilities are met. It’s a sunless day to be sure; how much cheer can you reasonably expect from Philip Larkin? But ringing telephones, regular mail delivery, and relatively engaging office work were no small matters to him. The assertion of continuity that they represent gets the last word. One way to regard this tenuous and temporary victory for the human is as a hollow joke; another way is to regard it as a tenuous and temporary victory.

In a similar vein, many readers find the last stanza of “High Windows” blankly nihilistic. Here, I think I can be more assertive: they’re wrong. It’s as if the poem argues against itself, the first four quatrains rationally putting the case for the absurdity of our delusions, and the last quatrain triumphantly ignoring those very same arguments:

And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

There’s much to be said for nothing and nowhere and endlessness. What strikes some readers as an ice-cold vision of the Void strikes me as a nearly Zen-like apprehension of emptiness in fullness and fullness in emptiness, rather like Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” but without all the difficulty.

O.K., so maybe some of Larkin’s poems give in a little too easily to his predisposition to desolation. Martin Amis, who as a boy received grudging “tips” from his parents’ frequent and melancholy houseguest, wrote in The War against Cliché, “For his generation, you were what you were, and that was that. It made you unswervable and adamantine.” Although I want and maybe need to believe that Larkin’s dauntless pessimism represents a valid and responsible ethics, I don’t really care if his views are unbalanced, unhealthy, unsound, and unheroic. He turned them into something human, something I can use. I happen to believe that the light that seeps into the last stanza of “Aubade” redeems the poem for its mortal readers, but no such redemption touches the earlier and starker “Next, Please.” This is a poem that insists with an almost perverse satisfaction on the absoluteness of death and the folly of our pathetic fantasies. I ought to be appalled. That I admire, even love these lines is partly an effect of Larkin’s usual mastery — in this case the way the poem builds to the apocalyptic from the banal, using the controlling metaphor of an approaching ship of death, like some nightmare out of Bram Stoker’sDracula:

Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

I could say that qualities of courage, honesty, and resolution inhere in “Next, Please,” but so do some other qualities — fatalism, perverseness, and morbidity, for example. Yet against these less ennobling qualities is a human sympathy that more than anything explains Larkin’s hold on his audience. To begin with, “Next, Please” is utterly accessible to the common reader. Nothing could be less esoteric than its form (couplets in quatrains) and nothing more straightforward than its argument — that we necessarily delude ourselves again and again until, finally, there’s no more life left to delude. The operative word is “we.” The poet clings to the same illusions that his readers do. After the poem is written and read, all of us will go back to the same “bad habits of expectancy / …Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear, / Sparkling armada of promises draw near.” I would like not to face death or even life the way Philip Larkin does in “Next, Please,” and I think I more or less succeed in doing so. But while I wait to achieve a heroic control over my fate that is never going to happen, I turn to Larkin’s poetry for companionship in my loneliness.

For most white Americans born outside the South, the Civil Rights Movement is the stuff of history books — fascinating, but abstract. For people like Taylor and myself, whose families were profoundly shaped by the civil rights struggle before we were born, that turbulent era is acutely personal, and at the same time distant and exotic.

We don’t know when it will happen — whether some April or July or December will be the cruelest month — but we know poets are fascinated with the end of the world. Novelists and essayists ponder the apocalypse, but poems are particularly suited toward capturing the anxiety of the end.

Consider Robert Penn Warren’s “Evening Hawk,” which narrows from the grand expansive — a hawk’s wing that “scythes down another day” along the “crashless fall of stalks of Time” — to the airless and anxious: “If there were no wind we might, we think, hear / The earth grind on its axis, or history / Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.” The relative brevity of Warren’s poem enables its power. We don’t need volumes upon volumes to proclaim the end: we need one final, focused gasp.

In a letter dated May 16, 1945, Wallace Stevens posed a question as a statement: “At the moment, the war is shifting from Europe to Asia, and why one should be writing about poetry at all is hard to understand.” Faced with destruction and death, the action of criticism feels cold and academic. Poetry, on the other hand, becomes necessary as the world crumbles. After 9/11, poetry seemed natural; many of us in New York City and its shadow carried folded copies of W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and “September 1, 1939” by W.H. Auden.

If we accept Stevens’s definition of the poetic act as “the desire to contain the world wholly within one’s own perception of it,” then poems about the end are simultaneously selfish and heroic attempts at survival. Here are 10 poems to prepare us for the end of the world.

“The world begins at a kitchen table,” Harjo starts. “No matter what, we must eat to live.” Communion and community thread throughout her poem. “It is here,” at a table, where “children are given instructions on what it means to be human.”

Harjo thinks our end has been foretold: “We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.” Her poem concludes with resigned hope: “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.” Her focus on a shared domestic space helps us forget about the enormity of the poem’s backdrop.

Is Frost’s poem a microcosm of Dante Alighieri’sInferno? Maybe. Yet I also like the origin story from astronomer Harlow Shapley: while Frost was a poet-in-residence at Harvard, he twice in one night asked Shapley how the world would end. Shapley’s response formed the polarities of the poem.

Read by countless middle-school students in requisite units on American poetry, “Fire and Ice” is heavier than its nine lines appear at first glance, and like much of his other work, darkly comic. Equally apocalyptic in spirit, and perhaps even more final in its small-town sadness, is Frost’s poem “Out, Out,” which ends with a minor apocalypse: a boy’s injury leads to amputation and then death, but the townspeople, “since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

The September 24, 2001, issue of The New Yorker had a black cover, and on its back page waited this poem. Zagajewski wrote the poem before 9/11, but like the verse of Yeats and Auden, sometimes words need to wait for their proper moment.

Note the evolution of the titular statement throughout the poem: we are called to “try to praise,” and then “you must praise,” “you should praise,” and finally the exasperated, exhausted, and yet somehow calm final “Praise the mutilated world / and the gray feather a thrush lost, / and the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns.” Zagajewski said there was not one particular event that birthed the poem, rather, “it’s the way I have always seen the world” — on the brink, and yet beautiful.

Maybe we will be laughing at the end. Mary Karr seems to think so. “Warring factions” will set the date for the end of the world. Physicists will send “copies of the decree to paradise / in case God has anything to say.” A lunar eclipse portends the end, and “Those who hated the idea stayed indoors” but will step out “onto porches and balconies to see / the human shapes twist and rise / through violet sky and hear trees uproot / with a sound like enormous zippers / unfastening.”

Karr’s lines unfurl toward hilarity and back again, and yet her lines capture quite what we’d expect an absent God to sound like as he watches his creation combust: “where the last spreadeagled Xs clung like insects, / then vanished in puffs of luminous smoke, // which traveled a long way to sting his nostrils, / the journey lasting more than ten lifetimes.”

“Those who expected lightning and thunder / are disappointed” on the day the world ends. From bees circling clovers to fishermen mending nets to vegetable peddlers shouting in the street, the world moves on, unknowing of its end. We almost certainly will not know when the end will come, and Milosz especially thinks those who expect “signs and archangels’ trumps” will be disappointed at the lack of ceremony.

If Harjo thinks our end is our beginning — or perhaps symbolic of one of our daily customs — then Milosz thinks our end will be a surprise for most. Except one: “Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet / Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy, / Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: / No other end of the world will there be, / No other end of the world will there be.”

Three iterations of the end of the world: Austin, Texas; New York, N.Y.; Okemah, Okla. In Austin, grackles line the pavement, “tails oil-black.” Nobody calls out of work. Instead, they “just sleepwalked to the Red Pony Lounge and dropped into silence.” There a man “reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a bird.” The narrator wants to wake it up. On the east coast, at lunchtime, the city smells sweet. Everyone hunts for one last taste. Even a “feuding couple falls silent in front of a window display of petit fours, chocolate tortes, marzipan apricots.” Finally, in the Midwest, the animals slowly become strange. “Goldfish leap down the street’s puddles. Hermit crabs scuttle over lawns, and cockatiels preen dirt from their wings.” A horse gallops down the street. The narrator’s dog “dives into her lap, and as the stars go black she is laughing.”

All stories about the end of the world are really about the end of our own worlds, the little, often unnoticed deaths that surround us daily. Glück’s poem has always felt strangely personal and interrogative for me. It begins with a bird’s call during the “still world” of the winter, but then immediately becomes direct in the second stanza: “You wanted to be born; I let you be born. / When has my grief ever gotten / in the way of your pleasure?”

Later: “never imagining the sound of my voice / as anything but part of you— / … only / persistent echoing / in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye.” Is this a mother? Is it God? It might be both: creators alike, after all.

I love the skill and restraint needed to develop a poem in a single room — a motel room, no less. Who among us has not felt that his or her particular end would come in some aberrant motel room, “Korean monster movie on the SyFy channel, / lurid Dora the Explorer blanket draped tentlike / over Baby’s portacrib to shield us from unearned / innocence.” If we are to believe Pierce and others, the end will arrive with a bit of blurring: “Grease-dusted ceiling fan / paddles erratically, two spars missing. Sheets whirled / to the polluted rug.” The family is splayed in this comfortably uncomfortable place: “My glasses on the side table / tipped onto scratchproof lenses, earpieces / sticking up / like arms out of disaster rubble. Your feet hooked over my feet. What miasma / lays gold dander down on forms of temporary / survivors wandering the promenade?” They are at peace in this “Sad Armageddon / of marriage: how pretty much nice / we meant to be, and couldn’t make a difference.”

We should lighten up a bit as we near the end of the list — a little poetic calm before the concluding storm. The narrator and his companions “stopped the car where the river curled,” at what is called the end of the world. They “scrambled down” beneath a bridge, cross the “gravel track of a narrow ridge” and thread the woods to reach the actual river. The narrator stands alone where the “white water goosetailed with eddying swell.” As in many of Gioia’s poems, he brings us to the final resting place of the poem and then steps back. We are with the narrator at the end of this world, looking downstream, where “There was nothing but sky, / The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.”

This is how the world ends: at a circus. MacLeish’s sonnet is actually a single swollen sentence. “Quite unexpectedly,” it begins, as Vasserot, the “armless ambidextrian” lit a match between his toes, and the lion is biting a performer’s neck — while the theater of the absurd reaches its pinnacle, “Quite unexpectedly the top blew off.”

The final stanza is masterful, garbled, clunky, recursive, and as close as our inadequate minds can image to the real, messy end. Most likely then, above our paled faces and “our dazed eyes,” there will be “nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.”

Mr. Akey, I, right now, have a copy of your lovely little memoir College on my office desk. I was delighted to see your name at the top of one of my go-to daily reads. Library is also great and I can’t wait to read your third book. Thanks for sharing this essay.

What to add to this discriminating, judicious appreciation written out of love and profound empathy?

If Larkin runs out on you and you crave more, you can try the poems of Thomas Hardy, which Larkin loved (see “Wanted: Good Hardy Critic” in _Required Writing_). Hardy shares many similar emotional qualities and wrote a great deal more (he also lived 24 years longer than Larkin). From a technical angle—and anyone who reads poetry sooner or later comes to love literary carpentry—Hardy exceeds Larkin in innovating verse forms, in developing formal structures that give his best poems the authority that every poem Larkin collected evinces.

Larkin _is_ on our side. When he writes of death “Most things may never happen: this one will,” some readers (me) feel a peculiar shiver. No one before has put this quite so inarguably or finally; and the understatement, the casualness (“things”) make this truth fresh all over again. If out of context, the line is not as powerful as it is in “Aubade,” even so, it stays. For me it is the private document that Blaise Pascal sewed into his coat and that never left him.

A superb essay that applauds a great poet for all the right reasons. It is perhaps an act of courage that Larkin’s arguably best poem, “The Whitsun Wedding,” goes unmentioned, especially as a counterweight to the grave pull of “Aubade” or “Next, Please,” since there’s no way such a keen admirer of Larkin could simply ignore “Whitsun.” But that fair poem’s embrace of life and its arc of transcendence is another essay, I suppose.

Thank you for a wonderful reading of an essential poet, and for coming to the defense of “Aubade” against Heaney and Milosz. One does so often in Larkin find the bleakness shot through with rays of light, even in the “characteristically intransigent ” “Old Fools” we do get “the million-petalled fower / of being here.”

Kiki Petrosino’s first book of poetry, Fort Red Border, will be published by Sarabande Books this summer.A line of poetry by Kiki: “You can’t lie to a machine. You can travel anywhere, in the right machine.I would like to talk about trumpet cases. And toolbelts. And those large, leather folios for carrying architectural drawings. I would like to talk about safety goggles, driving gloves, tap shoes, bowling bags. I would like to talk about all the cool stuff that cool people carry when they are about to do cool things, like scale mountains or make lithographs or filet enough tuna to feed a hundred wedding guests. Equipment, I mean. Accoutrements.One of the most frustrating aspects of being a poet is: I don’t get any stuff to play with. The craft of poetry involves surprisingly few physical materials. Good paper, a pen. Yes, certainly, a computer. But everyone uses computers; unfolding your laptop at a cafe is not necessarily a poet’s gesture. The presence of such machinery in the public sphere denotes only the idea of work, the broadest sketch of occupation. Sometimes, when I am writing poetry, I find myself wishing for the fluorescent orange belt I once possessed in my youth, when I was a “safety” at the crosswalk, ushering the smallest kids past the hot front grills of cars and school buses. I want other people to notice me and know that I’m a poet. Frank O’Hara says: “if/I ever get to be a construction worker/I’d like to have a silver hat please.” Totally!A poet moves through the world and no one realizes who she is. The things she touches, she touches. There are no silver hats, and therefore no rules, to govern how she addresses herself to the world. Srikanth Reddy says: “The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying.” Sabrina Orah Mark says: “I did not fear them until I wanted to be afraid.” A poet moves fiercely through creation like the Biblical Adam, naming things as she goes along. Like the poet, Adam is naked except for his imagination, and in a 5th century ivory diptych, the toes of his left foot stretch beyond the frame, as if to say that Adam is already too big for the britches he’s not wearing, already halfway out of Paradise and into the wide world, where no distances may mitigate his naming. Just so, the poet’s power is located somewhere inside the immediacy of creative action. The poet sees. The poet speaks. It’s here, in this freedom, that surprises begin.I know a chef who cultivates a sheaf of delicate knives. I know a painter who loves his linseed oil. These people make virtuosic use of their tools, moving beyond the limitations of our concrete, workaday world to bring something entirely new into it. This strange alchemy makes sonatas rise from plinths of wood and ivory; transforms a plaster wall into the face of the Virgin; makes marzipan appear where once were sugarwater, almond meal, and little else.For the poet, this transformation happens in the darkness of the braincase. There, we each shelter a secret trove of language; there we swing our special hammers of rock crystal and solitude. Virtuosity, for the poet, comes from locating that sweet lexical vein in the rock, where our true words live. I mean our real language, the words that belong to us and to no one else. There’s a point, in every poem I write, when I begin speaking my own language for the first time. It’s when I feel the poem’s heart beating out its bigness, or its littleness. It’s when I feel a bunch of sharp little stars gathering in my own chest.Who can deny that poems come from other, inner worlds? When Alice Notley says: “No one can sing the blues like no one. Believing in paradise which is red like fire,” she is giving us the gospel from her own planet. She is speaking a language that comes directly from her bloodstream. There are no silver hats, and so no way to predict how a poet may come into her full truth. There are no silver hats, and so any one of us may come to poetry with new songs in our mouths. Charles Simic says: “It was the age of busy widow’s walks. The dead languages of love were still in use, but also much silence, much soundless screaming at the top of the lungs.” Unlike other tradesmen, the poet is at her best when she doesn’t quite know what she’s making, whether her song will be silent or screaming. A master goldsmith takes the recipe for “wedding ring” into his own body, so that he can fashion one the right way, each time. But the poet has mastered her craft when each poem travels to radically different places, when the sand at Margate is just as golden, as illuminated, as the sand at the bottom of the Frito’s bag.Are you a poet? If you are, you don’t need to carry anything more than your secret song-engine. If you’re one of us, we’ll know you by the top of your lungs.More National Poetry Month at The Millions